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In warm spring evening sunshine in the centre of Leipzig a group of mostly young activists are trying to garner support for a petition. Large, glossy and clearly professionally printed posters call for an end to “the war against Russia”.
The activists are largely ignored by the shoppers and commuters making their way to the entrance of the nearby station. The only interaction I witness involves a young man who stops to say the best way of ending the conflict would be for Vladimir Putin to just withdraw from Ukraine.
Germany’s artistic institutions have distanced themselves from Russia in the immediate aftermath of Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Valery Gergiev, for (and as an) example, was sacked as the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra’s chief conductor when he refused to condemn the attack. He had held the post for seven years.
But there has nevertheless been an appetite to explore Russian works in the light of the country’s current leadership and actions, something that perhaps has reached a peak in Leipzig with the staging of Tchaikovsky’s Dame Pique (Queen of Spades), quickly followed by a full-on Shostakovich season across the city’s Augustus Square at the Gewandhaus concert hall.
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Loosely based on an 1834 story by Pushkin, Tchaikovsky’s opera was first performed in 1890, but it has been brought bang up-to-date in a new production that premiered in Leipzig on 10th May 2025.
All the soldier characters are in modern Russian army uniforms, and the set was clearly designed to evoke a Ukrainian battlefield of Beckett-like bleakness sometimes contrasted or combined with grand aristocratic interiors.
The plot involves gambling, an obsessive and destructive love affair, insanity, and revenge. It is safe to say there are no winners. The second act concludes with praises being sung to an autocratic Russian ruler while bodies are thrown into a pit. Here, the ruler was Catherine the Great, but the Putin parallel is clear.
The new production features sex, murder, domestic violence, drug-taking and drunkenness, and it is hard not to see it as an unflinching and brutal criticism of Russian aggression and society.
At the work’s conclusion the characters – by this time reduced to zombie-like grotesques – are all absorbed into the mud of the battlefield.
Elsewhere in Leipzig the Gewandhaus’ Shostakovich season is also timely, and not just because it marks the 50th anniversary of the composer’s death.
Shostakovich’s relationship with Russian authoritarianism defined his career. The season includes performances of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, an opera that was disliked by Stalin and condemned by the Soviet newspaper Pravda as “muddle instead of music”. Performances were banned for 25 years, until long after Stalin’s death.
Shostakovich was also a wartime composer – a native of Leningrad, his seventh symphony was written while that city endured its epic siege during the Second World War, and his eighth explores the deep despair and suffering brought by war and dictatorship. In the current era of state-sponsored murder and repression Shostakovich’s humane voice sounds loud and clear.
So, there is more to these events than just a desire to mark an anniversary or revive old works. Germany’s political and cultural consensus against Putin and his allies seems to be solidifying.
It is true that on the extremes of German politics pro-Russian positions are still advocated and supported. But there is a hardening of opinion that takes in the Greens – now in opposition – the Conservative CDU/CSU bloc of the new Chancellor Friedrich Merz, and their coalition partner, the centre-left SPD.
Before taking office Merz made clear his intention to strengthen Germany’s defence capabilities in the face of the Russian threat, and the unreliability and ambivalence of the Trump administration.
With cross-party support – excluding the Linke (Left) Party and the AfD – he amended Germany’s Basic Law to allow an unlimited increase on defence spending paid for through borrowing. That had previously been outlawed by Germany’s constitution-backed Debt Brake.
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During the election campaign Merz had promised not to touch the Debt Brake, but he justified the increase in defence spending with the threat posed by Putin’s “war of aggression against Europe”. He described the measure as “the first big step towards a new European defence community”, and he was backed by his own party, by the liberal FDP, the Greens, and the SPD.
And, as the next chapter of Germany’s political history gets under way, it is the SPD’s Boris Pistorius who stands tall as the only minister from the last government to retain his job in the new one. He has earned respect across the political spectrum as an effective and prescient Defence Minister, who in 2024 declared Germany’s military must be ready to fight a war against Russia by 2029.
Of course, there are those who have their doubts about German military expansion, particularly in eastern Germany, where support for the AfD and Linke are strongest.
It’s worth remembering that Vladimir Putin was stationed in Saxony as a soviet KGB off